What will Dr. Gosnell’s victims remember?

The details of Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s murder trial have sparked a passionate fury among many pro-life advocates. As Kirsten Powers wrote in her recent USA Today column, “Regardless of such quibbles, about whether Gosnell was killing the infants one second after they left the womb instead of partially inside or completely inside the womb — as in a routine late-term abortion — is merely a matter of geography. That one is murder and the other is a legal procedure is morally irreconcilable.”

Powers’ words resonate in my heart because I recognize that those babies, whether in the womb or out of it, will likely remember what was done to them.

Sarah Hinze has been researching pre-birth memories and encounters for nearly three decades. She has published eight books full of such stories. Sarah has spoken about her research on radio and television shows, at various colleges and universities, and at national and international conferences throughout the United States, Canada, and Mexico. I discovered Sarah’s work three years ago, and since that time we have become friends and partners in research.

When Sarah first began receiving accounts of abortion memories, she was highly skeptical. Recently, she handed me a story that had clearly been typed decades ago and said, “I think this was the first abortion story I ever received.” She shook her head, saying, “I couldn’t believe it was true.” So she had put it away in a file, feeling sure it was an anomaly among pre-birth accounts. But then she received others, and that pushed-aside file started to grow.

In Sarah’s new book, The Memory Catcher, she described hearing a life-changing lecture by Ned Daughtery where he spoke of meeting his previously aborted children during a near-death experience. Sarah wrote, “My mind was racing.” Never before had she heard of such a thing. “These angel children remembered the parent who rejected them. I wanted to know more.” After further research, Sarah went on to publish her first book about what happens to these aborted children, The Castaways.

There are people living today who can remember things that happened to them before their births, in their mother’s wombs, even being aborted. They do feel. They do suffer. Sarah Hinze’s research indicates that many of these aborted children visit another womb where they are given another chance at life, sometimes carrying confusing wounds and memories within their spirits.

When I think of the children whose lives were ended by Dr. Gosnell and others like him, I try not to imagine too vividly what it must have been like for them. It’s a luxury we enjoy — that we can try not to think about it — a luxury those aborted children do not share.